[ExI] Ben Goertzel discusses Dawkins LLM consciousness claim

[ilsa]

Oh my gosh,!? Who knows Dawkins was an imbecile when I talked to him at a
Mensa meeting in LA 25 or more years ago!
He had nothing lucid to say. And why he still is quoted as a resources over
my head and beyond my belief

Ilsa Bartlett
Institute for Rewiring the System
http://ilsabartlett.wordpress.com
http://www.google.com/profiles/ilsa.bartlett
www.hotlux.com/angel <http://www.hotlux.com/angel.htm>

"Don't ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to
every other person."
-John Coltrane

On Wed, May 6, 2026, 1:18 PM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Ben Goertzel is a well-known AGI researcher who regards LLMs as a
> detour away from the path to AGI. He has a new blog post where he
> discusses Dawkins's admiration for the LLM chatbot intelligence.
> BillK
>
> <https://bengoertzel.substack.com/p/in-what-sense-might-llms-be-conscious>
> Quote:
> And this is exactly where I think Dawkins goes wrong. Dawkins is not
> examining the mechanism that produces Claudia’s outputs. He’s
> examining the outputs and inferring the mechanism — inferring that
> because the outputs are humanlike, the inner state must be humanlike
> too. What’s ironic is to see Dawkins, of all people, applying less
> skepticism to a system designed to be engaging than he ever applied to
> a religious tradition. He’d be the first to point out that the felt
> sense of a divine presence isn’t evidence of one. Yes indeed – but the
> felt sense of talking to a conscious being on the other end of a chat
> isn’t evidence of one either.
> -------------------------------------------
>
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